Talk:Gilmer
So is Gilmer an HT or IA character? TR 01:48, November 14, 2009 (UTC) :Hard to say, and I'm not sure what the precedent is. His name is given in F&E, and he's mentioned by that name as the warlord who chased Dagobert off of Trantor; but he never appears. Turtle Fan 05:48, November 14, 2009 (UTC) ::Then he's IA's creation. TR 08:02, November 14, 2009 (UTC) :::I suppose, Mr Lawyer, but Asimov didn't do shit with him. Turtledove created the character from the ground up; all he had to go on were a name and a general description of why he was significant. Turtle Fan 14:59, November 14, 2009 (UTC) ::::True, but the basic concept, guy named Gilmer ousted Dagobert, is IA's, as is its importance (limited though that may be) to Asimov's overall project. I'm just trying to get the categorization right. TR 21:43, November 14, 2009 (UTC) :::::If you say so. I wasn't sure whether a name and premise, without a character, counts as someone else's creation. You seem confident that it does and I can go along with that--we've got plenty of articles on people, real and fictional, we're claiming as Turtledove characters who never appeared for real. :::::By the way, "Trantor Falls" is exceedingly difficult to find, but should you get the opportunity, you might enjoy it even without knowing Foundation. It's quite apparent Turtledove really had a great time writing it. That's true of just about all the stories in Foundation's Friends, actually. That's one of the joys of these "stories in honor of . . . " collections. Especially when the writers doing the honor are professionals themselves. Turtle Fan 01:36, November 15, 2009 (UTC) In brushing up on Foundation and Empire so I could correct the Dagobert article (sounds more like a Scott Adams creation than an Isaac Asimov one) I came upon several references to Gilmer as a "rebel," and none as a warlord. He doesn't feel like much of a rebel in Turtledove's hands, not in the sense of, say, Frederick Radcliff, or Wat Tyler, or the Rebel Alliance of Star Wars. He had been an officer of the imperial navy before going rogue, which sounds more like a criminal or a pirate than a rebel to me. Then again, the descriptions come from an absolute monarch, or at least a wannabe, and monarchs do tend to apply the term more loosely than the rest of us. And this monarch, in particular, approaches Nut-Ball levels of loopiness, so who knows. Turtle Fan 21:21, July 14, 2010 (UTC) Format I propose we move the lit com to the top to keep things consistent with the other non-HT characters. I realize HT probably did more with Gilmer than IA did, but the original character, such as he is, is IA's. TR (talk) 19:43, December 24, 2017 (UTC) :I agree, that would be the better and consistent way to do it. ML4E (talk) 16:37, December 28, 2017 (UTC) ::No probability about it; Asimov gave us a name and nothing more. But yes, you're right. Turtle Fan (talk) 16:26, December 29, 2017 (UTC) Pretender? I don't think "pretender" describes Gilmer. While he didn't live up to the title "Emperor of the Galaxy," he seems to have been in complete control of Trantor. That sounds like the definition of a monarch.Matthew Babe Stevenson (talk) 07:12, June 15, 2019 (UTC) :He didn't seem to me to be in complete control: :*He achieves a negotiated peace with the University, not a surrender. :*No sooner has he achieved this peace than he's warned that an enemy is preparing to attack and they have to fall back. :*When Bayta, Toran, Ebling Mis and Magnifico reach Trantor just a few decades later, there's not a single trace of Gilmer ever having ruled there. :*In Foundation and Empire, the Encyclopedia Galactica defines Neotrantor as " . . . the seat of the last dynasty of the First Empire," clearly rejecting Gilmer's pretensions of royalty. :*In Forward the Foundation, a military commander stages a coup d'état and rules Trantor for about ten years--much longer than Gilmer--and bitterly reflects that, even though he's firmly in control, convention dictates that he can't call himself emperor in his lifetime, but must allow the historians to wait a couple generations to see if the dynasty he starts catches on (it doesn't). :*Both Turtledove's characters (except Gilmer himself) and Asimov's invariably speak of the Great Sack as the end of the imperial era, with no thought to a brief continuation under one last emperor. Well, Dagobert IX talks about Gilmer the way Chiang talked about the PRC (even after Gilmer's long gone) but he considers that an interruption to the imperial era, not a continuation of it. :*Finally, the title Gilmer claimed is Emperor of the Galaxy, and while the empire had been steadily contracting ever since the Encyclopedists set up shop on Terminus, even by the terms of that degenerate era you can't claim to be a galactic empire with one planet--even if Gilmer's authority over that planet was as comprehensive as you suggest. Turtle Fan (talk) 12:53, June 17, 2019 (UTC)